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                                                                                                                                                 written in pencil Fried, Lewis

written in blue ink at top of first page of article To Jack - Best wishes & many thanks for your help - Lew Fried

                                                                                                Bernard Carr and
                                                                                          His italics Trials of the Mind

                                                                                                      LEWIS FRIED

Farrell's major fiction [" the story of America as I knew it"] is funded so greatly by the struggles of his youth and maturity that we are in danger of reading the Bernard Carr trilogy2note as mere autobiography. Evidence is not lacking to support such an interpretation. In the early forties, Farrell had become interested in the fate of leftist idealogues of the thirties, and "hoped to convey the 'seething background'"3note of the Depression years. Spanning the years 1927 to 1936, the Carr novels seem to be a vast roman à clef italics. Both Farrell and Carr left the University of Chicago, made their way to New York, clerked in cigar stores, sold advertising space, and returned to the South Side. Coming back to New York, both signed petitions calling for a writers' congress, addressed the assembly in speeches that are thematically similar, and drew fire from Marxist critics. John Keele ( "a chunky little man with an esoteric critical reputation was monotonously reading his paper in which he suggested that the slogan 'a people's literature' would be more attractive than the words 'proletarian literature'"4note ) reminds us of Kenneth Burke. Pat Devlin, a young, acclaimed proletarian writer from the mid-West ("There is more of the vigor of proletarian literature in a strike leaflet, however crudely written, than there is in all of the style and pseudo-erudition of a college graduate's painful course from the saints to the Revolution"5note) is strikingly similar to Jack Conroy. The figure of Eldridge seems to be based upon Earl Browder; Howard Mather upon Granville Hicks; Sherman Scott recalls Malcolm Cowley; Lloyd Street, Whittaker Chambers.

 I want to suggest, however, that the trilogy is an act of, and meditation

upon, the historiography of culture. The novels express--and dramatize--the problems besieging a writer who wishes to study the politics of social life. For

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